Influence and reception of Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche and psychoanalysis

The psychologist Carl Jung recognized Nietzsche's importance early on, and during the Nazi period proclaimed several Nietzschean statements about the nature of modernity and Nazism: he held a seminar on Nietzsche's Zarathustra in 1934. Jung's belief in the transmutation of evil into good, via a sort of Gnostic Nietzschean transvaluation, partially stems from his reading of Nietzsche. Thus accordingly Jung did not wholly morally condemn Nazism but expressed the German people had become "possessed" by "Wotanism". Nietzsche had also an important influence on psychotherapist and founder of the school of individual psychology Alfred Adler. According to Ernest Jones, biographer and personal acquaintance of Sigmund Freud, Freud frequently referred to Nietzsche as having "more penetrating knowledge of himself than any man who ever lived or was likely to live". Yet Jones also reports that Freud emphatically denied that Nietzsche's writings influenced his own psychological discoveries; in the 1890s, Freud, whose education at the University of Vienna in the 1870s had included a strong relationship with Franz Brentano, his teacher in philosophy, from whom he had acquired an enthusiasm for Aristotle and Ludwig Feuerbach, was acutely aware of the possibility of convergence of his own ideas with those of Nietzsche and doggedly refused to read the philosopher as a result. In his excoriating — but also sympathetic — critique of psychoanalysis, The Psychoanalytic Movement, Ernest Gellner depicts Nietzsche as setting out the conditions for elaborating a realistic psychology, in contrast with the eccentrically implausible Enlightenment psychology of Hume and Smith, and assesses the success of Freud and the psychoanalytic movement as in large part based upon its success in meeting this "Nietzschean minimum".